American Pilots Say ‘What About Us?’ After Delta Pays Out $1.1 Billion In Profit Sharing

This story was updated at 11:45 a.m with a comment from the United chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association.

Delta Air Lines said Wednesday that it will pay employees $1.1 billion in profit sharing for 2017, the fourth consecutive year for which the carrier will pay profit sharing of more than $1 billion.

While the Valentine’s Day payout is no doubt cheering Delta’s 80,000 employees – it amounts to an average of about $6,000 for each of them — pilots at American Airlines are concerned because their profit sharing rate is less than at either Delta or United.

A Delta captain will get a payout of $29,000 to $59,000, according to the Allied Pilots Association, which represents 15,000 American pilots, while a United captain gets between $9,300 and $20,500 and an American captain gets $3,600 to $7,500.

Lower payouts at American result from both lower pre-tax profits and a lower award percentage, as well as from a contract, signed in 2015, that does not include profit sharing.

Since that industry-leading contract was signed, American pilots have fallen behind their peers. In 2016, the carrier went outside the contract to provide profit sharing, at a rate that existed in an American Airlines contract before the 2013 merger with US Airways. The contract becomes amendable in 2020.